Onlus Medicine Foundation

Since 2019, together with the Public Libraries and the Reading Circle, a programme for the promotion of reading has been set up with a view to transforming waiting periods in hospital. And so, thanks to donations to the Medicine for Women Foundation 2000 books have thus been made available. The institution launches a network project for the promotion of Reading in the Hospital which starts from the S. Anna Hospital and becomes part of the Pact for Reading of the City of Turin. An ecosystem is born in interinstitutional collaboration with the Turin Civic Libraries , Iter - Turin Institution for Responsible Education , the Circolo dei readers Foundation , the AVO-Associazione Volontari Ospedalieri , the S. Anna University Hospital of Turin. The collaboration, established over a three-year time horizon, aims to give value to waiting time in the hospital, to reach new readers, to create a platform for the synergistic, organic development of existing projects, to launch experiments with great attention to processes and assessable in their impact and extensible in other contexts.

Foundation Onlus has activated a multi-year programme of studies through the first national platform title Cultura e Salute (‘Culture and Health’), together with over 60 cultural institutions. Among the pilot projects staged at St Anna, together with the Education Department of Castello di Rivoli, the Foundation activated what it calls a Cantiere dell’Arte (‘Art Workshop’) in order to transform healthcare spaces on the basis of patients’ desires. With collective painting projects – involving more than two thousand people – passageways, waiting rooms and whole wards have been given a new lease of life, becoming more hospitable with images and colours evoking the pleasantness of a garden, a metaphor dear to every culture.

The project Nati con la Cultura | Born with Culture is being applied throughout Italy, promoting the role of museums for parental support. Culture thus becomes a key element for babies to thrive and to adopt a healthy lifestyle right from their very first steps. "Nati con la Cultura" was born in 2014 from a project conceived at Sant'Anna in Turin - the largest and oldest gynecological and obstetric hospital in Europe - by the Onlus Foundation in collaboration with the Modern Art Museum to build a path that associates the moment of motherhood and fatherhood with an educational opportunity, accompanying the parenting role.
With the kit dedicated to the new born (over 7000 a year by parents from 85 countries), the doctors deliver a Cultural Passport, recommending cultural participation as a resource for good bio-psycho-social growth. The cultural passport is an invitation from the museum that will freely welcome the whole family from the first year of age of the baby. The cultural passport is a welcome of citizenship to newborns and a initiative for parental support, being a resource in the educating community. Practically, on being discharged from the hospital, along with their Health Kit, each child is given a Cultural Passport which over the child’s first year of life, grants the family free access to 36 museums throughout Piedmont, recognised as Family and Kid-Friendly by the Museum Season Ticket network.
The evidence of the research outlines the fundamental elements of the experience to be developed by a museum in order to be suitable for children and families. These have been collected in the Decalogue of orientation and in two Manifestos: one for museums and one for families. Museums that meet the requirements indicated in the Decalogue and welcome families with a Cultural Passport will be able to use the Born with Culture certification.

Musical vitamins - Is the live music program that started in 2016 at the request of the nurses of the Oncology Day Hospital of the S. Anna Hospital in Turin, the largest hospital dedicated to women in Europe. More than 400 events have been organized by the Medicina a Misura di Donna Foundation in collaboration with thirteen cultural institutions, over 225 artists, with a daily program. They are entertaining visitors while waiting, improving the waiting time, they accompany women during oncological therapies, such as chemotherapy and they welcome new-borns. Since 2017, thanks to the massive mobilization of the Turin jazz community, it has been enriched with a dedicated review. The program is part of the interdisciplinary platform “Art, Health and Social Change”. It is followed and evaluated with periodic qualitative analyzes - focus groups and wellbeing questionnaires - by researcher Sandy Ghirardi (prof. Pier Luigi Sacco - IULM University of Milan).